116 3rd St SE
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Marion man has documented thousands of insect species across Iowa. Here’s how he does it
Jim Durbin’s database has helped research conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Iowa DNR
Sep. 2, 2025 5:30 am, Updated: Sep. 2, 2025 7:23 am
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MARION — Jim Durbin had no idea an insect identifying event at Linn County’s Rock Island Preserve in 1998 would turn into a hobby that would become a decades-long passion project.
Durbin, who retired from Rockwell Collins in April 2006, was hooked.
“I thought, ‘Well, that's kind of cool’,” he said. “So, I decided to start doing it, and I'm still doing it.”
He started going out to Iowa state parks on the weekends in 1998, identifying different insects and taking photos of them for his records.
Those trips — and the many Durbin has taken since then — have resulted in one of — if not the — largest insect databases in Iowa.
For Iowa alone, he has recorded more than 1.3 million observations of different insect, moth and butterfly species, birds, animals and mushrooms.
About 1,600 of those observations were submitted to him by other Iowans and recreationists, but most of them were recorded by Durbin.
For insects alone, Durbin said he has slightly more than 1 million observations recorded and has identified 7,339 species.
“I had no clue it would get this comprehensive,” said Durbin, who also is also a member of the Cedar Rapids Audubon Society.
How it started
Durbin had been working several years to identify different insect species in Iowa before he started documenting them on his Insects of Iowa website, insectsofiowa.org.
In 2012, he got his database up and running. Anyone can use it to look up different species, explore which counties those species have been found in, look at photos of Iowa’s wildlife that Durbin has taken, and learn about the work he does.
“After I got the new website going, it took me two years to get all the data and the pictures transferred over,” Durbin said. “I had a lot of data I collected over those few years.”
In 2018, Durbin launched an identification component to his website, which made it easier to identify species, especially moths.
At first, Durbin and the software engineer who helps him run the website programmed the system to identify moths, but trained it for all the data he had on his website.
When he started, Durbin said digital cameras weren’t widely available, so he had to collect the insect specimens, take them home and pin them in his collections. From there, he could get to work identifying them.
At that time, Durbin said the state’s wildlife guidelines and literature reported there were about 120 species of butterflies in the state and about 1,200 species of moths.
But since 1998, Durbin, with help from other Iowans who have submitted insect samples and photos to him, has identified about 20,435 species for the state.
“Obviously that ratio was pretty far off,” he said.
Durbin visits Iowa parks and natural spaces at night to collect insect samples and identify the species. He sets up a photography tent to attract moths and insects, then works to photograph them and identify them.
He uses special LED black lights to attract the insects.
“It does very good of attracting pretty much anything and everything that'll come to the lights that way,” he said.
Durbin uses a 100-millimeter macro lens on his camera, which allows him to take extreme close-up photos of the species he works with so he can have the most detailed photo possible for the website and for his own records.
He renames, dates and adds a location tag to all the photo files before he catalogs the photos in the database.
Durbin also uses Adobe Lightroom — an image organization and editing application tool — to help him add GPS coordinates to the metadata of the photo.
Durbin said he has about seven main locations where he takes photos. He visits them on a two-week rotation.
“That seems to be a good time of catching the end of (the insects) there on the front end and of what's coming,” Durbin said. “So, a two-week rotation, at least, I found seems to be a good timing to go hit different places and see what you can see.”
What’s on the website
On the Insects of Iowa website, Durbin keeps comprehensive records of the type of species that were found, when, where, and who found them.
Website users can filter and search the site’s records to find a specific species or type of insect. They can also search by time of year and location.
Users can also search insects, animals and plant records by county across the state and by protected species status.
If Iowans have a photo of a species that they want to identify, they can upload the photo into the database, where the site will match it based on records. The website also can identify butterfly species from across the U.S.
Also, users can submit sightings if they believe they’ve found an unknown or rare species. Durbin’s website has a mobile app component where users can access the data and submit their sightings through their smartphones.
Aiding state research
Durbin’s work comes as many insect, moth and butterfly populations in Iowa — and across the country — are declining.
In April, a group of researchers across multiple universities, government agencies and environmental groups found that butterfly populations across the country have declined about 22 percent over the past two decades.
The researchers have pinned the decline on chemical use, habitat loss and a warming climate.
Durbin said he hasn’t witnessed declines while working in the field. In fact, he said he continues to find new species.
“Every year we keep coming up with adding new species,” he said, adding that earlier this summer, in one night at Palisades-Kepler State Park, he found five species he hadn’t documented before.
That’s not easy. After decades of doing this work, he said finding new species has become more difficult.
“The joke is in this business is the longer you do this, the smaller they get and the idea is that you get through all the great big (species) first, and then you start noticing the little teeny things that look like dots on the white background and find out it's a moth,” he said. “A lot of nights I'll take pictures of something on the sheet and don't realize what it is until I get home and start blowing the photographs up and find out it's some new little beetle or a little moth.”
Durbin’s database is so comprehensive, he has helped Iowa researchers by submitting his records for studies.
In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reached out to Durbin asking for his help identifying butterfly species.
“I'm also on the Iowa Wildlife Action Plan Committee for butterflies, and we use some of my data for deciding some of the statuses of the butterflies in the state,” he said. “My data, pretty much, is the biggest list of data for the state.”
Stephanie Shepard, wildlife diversity biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said she has worked with Durbin on several projects.
“He's been especially incredibly valuable in the compiling of a lot of insect data, particularly moths,” Shepard said. “It's been instrumental, because there's over 2,000 species of moth in the state, and so that's pretty overwhelming number of species and diversity. He's just able to really dig in and focus on it and get really passionate about it.”
Shepard said Durbin has a talent for pulling data together and that he is “tireless” in doing it.
“There's still a lot of stuff about moths we don't know in the state, but we've been working on updating our lists of species of greatest conservation need in our Wildlife Action Plan and when that ends up getting finalized, we'll be including moths in the plan for the first time,” she said. “Because we actually had some data to work with (from Durbin) and some idea of what species are in the state and so really instrumental in helping us learn and know more about the insects in Iowa.”
Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.
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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com
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